Today I tested the image on my SmartTop. It booted fine, and as networking also worked, I could add many packages from the command line.
As a syslog-ng fanatic, I also tested, if replacing rsyslog with syslog-ng solves the shutdown problem, but it does not. So it's still better to use the workaround in the original blogpost.

I tried it both from gparted and also from the YaST partitioner on my SuSE laptop, but neither of them worked. "gparted" found the partitions on the SD card, but provided external tools with wrong partition names... YaST also uses parted, so had most likely the same problem.

Today I tried to install XFCE on my openSUSE image. This also involved installing Xorg. The usual way of starting Xorg (starting with an empty xorg.conf) did not work. It did not find a screen. As a workaround I downloaded a random xorg.conf for framebuffers, and X started.

I still need to get XFCE working. There were some dependency problems during installation, so while I get the "tip of the day" message after logging in, I don't get a panel or menus. I still hope to fix it for the weekend: FOSDEM!

I got some progress: XFCE works. I needed some workarounds (not ARM, but openSUSE Factory specific), which were well hidden in different bugs and forums. Here are they:

Code:

zypper in gcc46

Which removes the cpp related error messages, and the following line into /etc/profile.local:

Code:

export LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libxcb-util.so.0

which is needed for most X applications to start.

Now I'm fighting with an ugly symptom: as soon as X starts, network access is gone. I can't see anything in dmesg or the logs. The kernel is the same, as in the latest Genesi image: 2.6.31.14.26-efikamx, and I don't experience this when running Ubuntu.

After updating my EFIKA yesterday, I ran into a strange problem: my / partition was mounted read only, which obviously caused some trouble on boot and afterward. Of course / can be remounted rw:

Code:

mount -o remount,rw /

But it's better to have a permanent solution. The image originally came with an ro boot parameter, meaning read only root. This needs to be changed. If you don't have make installed, then first install it:

Code:

zypper in make

Then change to the /boot directory, and open the file called boot.script in your favorite text editor. At the end of the line starting setenv bootargs, replace ro with rw. Save the file, and then execute the following command:

Code:

make

Which will compile boot.script to boot.scr, which is in a form understandable by u-boot.
On next boot / will be mounted rw.
And one more good news: the annoying bug of not being able to shut down the EFIKA properly is now gone.